WR: January 2 – January 8

There is no Place Like School

Man, school never changes, does it? Like the start of the week after Thanksgiving break, I believed that we would take a bit of time to get back into the regular pace. Instead, we immediately get back into things without even a mention of the fact that we’ve been out of school for two weeks. Nonetheless, I’ll first go over my break, then over the things I did this week.

The first thing to get done was my huge AP Government packet. This thing was a massive pain to get done purely because of the sheer amount of information required to finished it. Furthermore, the majority of it wasn’t over stuff we’ve covered; it was over all the court cases, amendments, and rules that the government has placed. I understand that since it’s a semester class, they want to drill the information into our heads, and that gave me the small motivation needed to get this beast done. As this packet was huge, it took me quite a few hours to get it done. In order to ease the workload, I spread the work over three to four days.

The next thing I wanted to do was to finish “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde”. The biggest trouble I had regarding this book was that I couldn’t find the ninety-page version, therefore I had to buy the seventy-five-page version that included 150 pages of “other stories”. However, once my teacher replied to my email saying that version was okay, I began reading. If it was purely reading, I could’ve been done with the book in about a day; however, because I had to annotate as well, I spread the book into two days.

Another big thing I wanted to do was to finish my research interviews. About a week or two before break started I emailed Dr. John Polousky for an interview, which he agreed to on December 19th. After finishing the interview, I was deeply interested in Dr. Polousky’s role as an orthopedic surgeon and wanted to ask him to be my mentor. A week after the interview I finished my assessment and email and emailed him my mentor request. Fortunately, he agreed to be my mentor! However, even until the day that I am posting this report, I am working with his assistant to finish the form required for me to be at the Children’s Hospital with Dr. Polousky. I eagerly look forward to the day in which I am able to shadow Dr. Polousky.

The last work thing I did was to design my board for ISM. I wanted to have a theme made up of silver, dark blue, and mustard-gold color, and therefore got spray paint in order to customize the board the way I wanted. In order to make the gold border I made half an inch marks around the border, used tape to leave just that border exposed, added a few layers to prevent too much collateral damage, then spray painted using a thick coat of paint. After that dried, I used a few layers of tape to cover the border, then spray painted the insides silver. Since the majority of my actual paperwork on the board is done, all I have left now is to add more designs and find some unique ways to incorporate the theme of orthopedic surgery into the board.

Finally, I can get started on this week. The first thing I had to do was a test in pharmacology over two lists of drugs. While this might sound easy, I can assure that it held a moderate level of difficulty. However, I had memorized the majority of the contents prior to winter break, but after the break, I could barely remember the generic names. So over two days I studied everything on those two lists.

The next thing I had to do was to finish my vocabulary terms for my AP Government test. While this wasn’t too bad, adding it to all of the other test preparations made it all the harder. Furthermore, the majority of the words were barely present in the textbook reading, meaning that I had to learn what they all had meant. I can only hope for a good grade on my test now, but I’ll try my hardest to get a good grade.

The next thing to get done was my AP Biology quiz over 3 portions of a chapter. This would normally require just a bit of book reading and then I could get a 100 hundred simply because I memorized the models. However, I was unable to read those chapter the night before the test and therefore had to study the day of the quiz and even then I barely had enough time to graze over the chapter. Therefore, before the quiz, I asked my biology teacher to go over the chapter. I believe that I made a good grade.

The last thing to do was to work on my medical microbiology project. Honestly speaking, it wasn’t very work intensive, but it was hard to come up the idea for the project in the first place. Furthermore, the majority of the project will depend on my group’s acting skills. Well, with all that said and done, only one thing left to say: